to cardiac health. Half the students had a family history of cardiac disease and were
expected to take the task more seriously than the others, who had no such history. All were
asked to recall either three or eight behaviors in their routine that could affect their cardiac
health (some were asked for risky behaviors, others for protective behaviors). Students
with no family history of heart disease were casual about the task and followed the
availability heuristic. Students who found it difficult to find eight instances of risky
behavior felt themselves relatively safe, and those who struggled to retrieve examples of
safe behaviors felt themselves at risk. The students with a family history of heart disease
showed the opposite pattern—they felt safer when they retrieved many instances of safe
behavior and felt greater danger when they retrieved many instances of risky behavior.
They were also more likely to feel that their future behavior would be affected by the
experience of evaluating their risk.
The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1
heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged.
Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be
guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who
are in a state of higher vigilance. The following are some conditions in which people “go
with the flow” and are affected more strongly by ease of retrieval than by the content they
retrieved:
when they are engaged in another effortful task at the same time
when they are in a good mood because they just thought of a happy episode in their
life
if they score low on a depression scale
if they are knowledgeable novices on the topic of the task, in contrast to true experts
when they score high on a scale of faith in intuition
if they are (or are made to feel) powerful
I find the last finding particularly intriguing. The authors introduce their article with a
famous quote: “I don’t spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I
think is the right way to act. I’ve just got to know how I feel” (Georgee e the w W. Bush,
November 2002). They go on to show that reliance on intuition is only in part a
personality trait. Merely reminding people of a time when they had power increases their
apparent trust in their own intuition.
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